Google TV Is Officially Laid To Rest With Developers Asked To Focus On Android TV

At Google's I/O event in the summer we were introduced to a number of different new Android platforms. By now, you are probably familiar with most of them. If you are a TV or movie lover then you might have been most interested in Android TV. This was essentially Android for your living room. Most avid Android fans will already know that this is not Google's first attempt at a living room based Google experience. Back in 2010 the company did try a similar product with Google TV however it ultimately failed and in quite an epic fashion. It was never really clear as to why Google TV failed so much. It was quite a buggy software although part of the reason may well have simply been the market was not ready for the product yet. Irrespectively, Google TV was not for keeping.

However, Android TV on the other hand, seems to be a completely different beast. This time, the market seemed ready for the product and (probably more importantly) the product seemed right for the market. So the early indications (or at least belief) was that Google had learned from their previous mistakes and Android TV would hit the ground running. With Google TV pretty much fading into oblivion and Android TV being unleashed to the market, you may have already considered Google TV dead and buried. Well, it wasn't. However, today, Google has finally laid Google TV to rest,

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In a blog post entitled 'Dear Google TV developers', Google thanked developers for their contribution to the Google TV project but made it clear that "going forward" all efforts will be redirected to Android TV. Effectively, closing the chapter on Google TV. The blog did go on to note that Google TV (in its current state) would continue to function although they would no longer be supported, and the developer libraries no longer available for future development. Interestingly, Google did note that a subset of Google TV devices will be updated to Android TV although Google did state that this would be a "small subset" and "most Google TV devices won't support the new platform'. Finishing up the blog post, Google also did encourage users to jump on board Android TV and did say that it will be easy to "transition" their Google TV apps over to Android TV for future use. So, are you sad to see the Google TV chapter finally and fully be closed? Let us know.